Internet Retailer’s recent report series The Best Digital Marketers in E-Commerce confirms what most industry experts see as a 2017 priority, truly understanding today’s customers and, in turn, successfully driving consumers to buy across multiple marketing channels.

From looking at the winning strategy of the retail giant Target, it is clear that customer data ultimately determines how the retailer determines its digital marketing budget to drive online sales. “We’re one of the lucky ones with rich first-party data,” says Kristi Argyilan, Target’s senior vice president of marketing. “That enables us to target real human beings, which helps us get greater returns than targeting audiences that rely on aggregated information to find signals of intent.”

Target has also dissolved its marketing silos by bringing together the teams that handle various marketing channels so that everyone can examine the same data to see where the retailer needs to change its budget. This sharing of data has helped the Target marketing team see better efficiency and effectiveness of its email, social and search strategies.

One channel that Target has been especially active with is paid search, buying an amount that would be a fourth of eCommerce juggernaut Amazon’s $41 million monthly 2016 paid search spend. Argylian says those dollars are well spent given that paid search drives 13.5% of Target.com’s overall traffic while also contributing to in-store traffic and sales.

The 174 page series provides exclusive rankings and analysis of the top retailers across all digital marketing channels including The Best Social Media Marketers in E-Commerce, Best Search Marketers in E-Commerce and Best Email Marketers in E-Commerce. That is a lot of good information for web merchants and multi-channel retailers who can never have enough data.